6 Part I: Land and Language
The search for sacred texts, which occupied Chinese, Japanese, and South-
east Asian intellectuals for better than half a millennium—India was the source
for most of them—involved difficulties of translating mutually unknown lan-
guages and deciphering each other’s exotic texts. India had one script, China
another. Those who came in search of civilizing texts—Japan to China, South-
east Asia to India—had the problem of fitting scripts meant for one language to
their own very different ones. Japan, with its polysyllabic language, could have
had a better neighbor than China to borrow a script from; India’s would have
suited much better. Southeast Asia’s Sino-Tibetan languages would have done
well with China’s logographic script, meant for monosyllabic languages, but
the texts they were borrowing were Indian. Thus it went.
India and China are the two foundational civilizations of Asia. These two
civilizations were creating their characteristic profiles during the pivotal first
millennium B.C.E. Over a thousand year period, both China and India were
developing concepts of social order and institutions of civil society that have
characterized them into the present. During this period, the Indian caste sys-
tem was taking form. The Chinese centralized state had its earliest instance
under the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang, who became one model of the author-
itarian emperor ruling under the Mandate of Heaven. In India, Emperor
Ashoka embodied the ideal ruler, the dharmaraja (“righteous king”) responsible
for moral order in the state. The Upanishadic philosophers, Buddha, and Con-
fucius lived and taught during the middle centuries of the first millennium
B.C.E., and their philosophies became as foundational for their civilizations as
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were for Europe. All these thinkers lived within a
few centuries of each other during a period sometimes called “the axial age”
because it was a kind of axis or pivotal point in history. Both civilizations were
decisively configured during this epoch in ways that civilizations in later centu-
ries expanded, elaborated, and reformed.
Southeast Asia and Japan came under influence from India and China,
respectively, in the following millennium (the first millennium C.E.), so that the
earliest forms of the state and court culture in those hinterlands resembled the
more advanced cultures from which they borrowed. The early states of South-
east Asia borrowed, along with sacred texts and scripts from India, concepts of
the sacred kingship, the devaraja or “god-king.” They accepted first Hinduism
and, later, Buddhism. Japan borrowed everything it possibly could from China:
books, script, urban planning, Confucianism, Buddhism, and the imperial sys-
tem—but without the undesirable feature of the Mandate of Heaven that could
be withdrawn by Heaven in the case of a successful rebellion. The imperial
dynasty founded during the period of borrowing from China, but subsequently
projected backward in time to the Sun Goddess, has survived into the present;
Emperor Akihito is the 125th emperor of Japan. Of course, both Southeast
Asia and Japan made these cultural borrowings their own in unique ways, but
their affinities to India and China remain clearly visible even in the present.